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Barbara Dilley BARBARA DILLEY. Born 1938 Transcript of OH 1335V. This interview was recorded at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, on June 3, 2005, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program. The interviewer is Shirley S. Steele, who also transcribed the interview. The interview also is available in video format, filmed by Shirley Steele. NOTE: The interviewer's questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets. [A]. 00:00 (This interview with Barbara Dilley is under the auspices of the Maria Rogers Oral History Program, Carnegie Library for Local History. Barbara Dilley is sharing her memories of the early history of Naropa University where she was president for ten years, and has been, before and since, a teacher in the performing arts. It is June, 2005. We are in Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado. I am Shirley Steele.) (I will take it back to you. How did you get here and when?) I was invited here to teach the very first summer of Naropa. It was called Naropa Institute at that time. I was invited by a friend of mine, named Tom Hast who lives here in Boulder now, owns a real estate company, Hast & Company, but at that time he had been involved in the alternative dance community in New York and that was where we met. He was a traveler, on the way, a journeyer, and had become part of the administration for the very first summer of Naropa which was ten weeks—two five-week sessions, I believe—in the summer of 1974. Tom phoned me, I was in Rhode Island on the East coast, and he phoned me at the end of May, probably, and asked me if I would be willing to come and teach that summer. I was surprised at the invitation and I said, “I need to think about it for a little while.” So we hung up, and I thought about it, and I realized that I actually was performing and touring in Buffalo, New York, and it was right, it made sense, the time he was inviting me made sense, which was probably the end of July or some time in August. So I phoned him back, and I said, "Fine, Tom I’ll come.” So I came here, and it was a surprising community had already gathered. Very rich, very diverse. I was teaching, I think, for two-week sessions and classes were happening all over Boulder. There had been a surprising number of people attracted to the opening of Naropa University. I think they had expected maybe four hundred or five hundred people and over two thousand people showed up. So every one who was involved in the administration that summer was scrambling around to rent spaces at the university and to rent folding chairs and tables and try to set up classrooms. 03:47 (Where was this located right then?) Well, the offices were at 1441 Broadway, which is a, I don’t know what it is currently but that was kind of the main headquarters for the administration and then the place on the corner of Arapahoe and Broadway, which is currently a Wild Oats Market. That building had been a bus depot and it had, was no longer a bus depot, so the Naropa administration rented it for a lot of the big, major presentations by— There were two main spiritual teachers that summer. One of them was the founder, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the other one was Ram Das who had a tremendous reputation, particularly during the sixties. He wrote a seminal text for the young American spiritual seeker, called Be Here Now. So the combination of these two spiritual teachers, I think, was a big exciting duo for many, many of the people who came. (When you think back on it do you have any sense of what brought them together?) Trungpa Rinpoche and Ram Das? Well, each of them had a pretty different story. Trungpa Rinpoche was invited here by one of the faculty members of the university to teach in a, I believe it was in a religious studies class. And what I heard, the story that I heard, is that when he came, here, he was so moved by the Rocky Mountains, that they reminded him a great deal of his home country of Tibet. So there was a longing, I think, to be in an environment like this, perhaps, for him and also that it would be a good environment to continue to develop the teaching that he was doing on the traditional Tibetan Buddhist dharma. So he was already here and then when the plan arose, probably in ‘73, maybe ‘72, to run an educational institute during the summer time, then an invitation was extended to Ram Das. So Ram Das came at the invitation of Trungpa Rinpoche, for that very first summer. (Was it still under, was there any connection to CU?) Not at that point, at all, there has never been a connection other than, perhaps, that guest faculty position that Trungpa Rinpoche had briefly. I don’t know too much about that. (I interrupted you, and you were starting to talk about . .) That first summer? Well, this big space which is now Alfalfa’s—or Wild Oats, it was Alfalfa’s— it had that parking lot to the west of the building, which is still the parking lot for the supermarket, was quite an amazing sort of circus atmosphere. When we came in during the evenings for these lectures, it was the, sort of the coming to the end of what was called the hippie era, and there were many world seekers and travelers with artifacts and incense and beads and all kinds of objects. And just like in India, they laid out a mat and they put their wares down on the mat and you could walk— Like a bazaar. It was like a bazaar in the East somewhere and that gave it a very unique flavor that first summer. Arriving there, that beautiful light of Boulder summers in July and having these young people with their mats laid out and their special objects for sale. (What were you doing?) Well, I was, at that point, teaching different approaches to improvisational dance, which was a very popular approach of the alternative dance community, during, this was in the sixties and then seventies and then subsequently from that, it is a field that I developed to a large extent because I had the opportunity to be in the class room here. So I was teaching a class on experimental movement/improvisation, I forget the title of it. 10:13 (Your students, were they mainly interested in the atmosphere, technique?) That’s a good question. There were a lot of classes you could take. There were music classes, there were Thangha painting classes, there were psychology classes, there were Buddhist classes and Hindu, different religions. Already it was quite a diverse collection of classes. Perhaps ecology was already here. So someone would come and they would sign up, similar to what you would do at a university or a college. You would take maybe three different classes and one of them might be a movement class and one of them would be the class in the evenings. Almost everybody came to those evening lectures by Thungpa Rimpoche and Ram Das. And, I forget whether you took one or it was all part of one class. I don’t really remember. But, there were, you know, over 1500 people would show up in this big open space. (It sounds almost as if it were growing at that time. I’m not hearing anything about faculty committees or curriculum, or schedules or anything else.) Yes, it was a kind of a — I mean, Tom Hast invited me, people just invited people they thought would work in this environment. I suppose it was important to have some famous names, you know. But they did put out a catalog, I don’t remember when, but there is a historical catalogue of that first summer, so people could research who actually was invited to be faculty here. And that format of the summer program, the summer institute, Naropa's Summer Institute, that was a hall mark of Naropa and its approach to education for five, six, seven years, maybe longer, but it was a very rich time in the summer, and then there was this decision to go ahead and create year around programs. And those programs were planned in the summer of ‘76 and then they began January, ‘77. But all along, these summer Institute programs were a big deal. (Were they self supporting, did they get funds from other sources?) I don’t know about that. Probably it was a mixture of using the income from the programs to support it. There probably were some donations by interested people who wanted to see something like this happen. I would guess it was a mixture. (Did the people of Boulder participate, or watch or—?) That’s a good question. Boulder was a very quiet town in 1974. The Pearl Street Mall didn’t really get built until ‘77 or ‘78, I can’t remember. But it was a quiet town in the summers. The University sessions, I guess maybe there was a summer session at the University, but my image of it, my memory of it at that time was that it was a fairly quiet town. I don’t know how much there was participation as students by Boulder residents.
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